If this blog platform had a more fluid system for tagging, there'd be a category for Synthese scandal. The journal has recently been tarnished (again) by egregious problems with a special issue. The philosophy blogosphere lit up with it a week or two ago. If you missed it, the post at Daily Nous covers the essentials.

Unlike earlier debacles, however, the editors have responded to this in a responsible way before the petitions were drawn up and boycotts were organized. They've made a public apology for the mess. They have announced a moratorium on future special issues so that they can take a serious look at the process, although issues already underway will go forward. Well done!

On reflection, I think it is important for there to be reputable journals which publish special issues of conference papers. It seems to me that the alternatives are (a) that conference papers not be published at all or (b) that they be published as stand-alone volumes. Not publishing at all would be a shame. The Paris symposium where I presented my paper brought together several of us doing related work on natural kinds, and it makes sense for the work we presented to appear together somewhere. And stand-along volumes are often only carried by a few libraries, so the papers don't get widely read. Having the papers appear in Synthese at least gives them a chance at readership.

There is a the third option, (c) that the papers would simply be made freely available from an on-line archive. This would be optimal, I think, although the authors might not feel an impetus to edit and complete their contributions. Conditional on closed-access journals being a thing that we still do, special issues of journal are valuable.

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